ABSTRACT
Imagine your life as a line of dots representing events. Now imagine that every event about which some organization records personal information is colored red and that all the other dots are blue. How much of your life’s line is red? A lot—and more all the time. Advances in information processing technology give others considerable power to collect, analyze, and distribute personal information, and “it has become increasingly rare to deal with any governmental or private-sector organization without generating and relying upon a database of personal information.”1 The consequence is a loss of informational privacy, which concerns our control over our information. As Alan Westin puts it in his 1967 classic, Privacy and Freedom (the first book on modern consumer privacy issues), it is “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.”2 Today, the lines of our lives are increasingly red. The degree of control over our personal information that we once had has vanished.
